Strolling through the Place Des Vosges, Anne Strasberg admired the majestic brick buildings bordering the square, the orange and crimson leaves blanketing the ground, the children bursting with excitement as they rode a carousel.

"It's one of the squares of Paris that people know about and love," Strasberg, a native of the French capital, said. "I come to see the beauty, the harmony."

Strasberg carries this whimsical, wide-eyed view everywhere she goes, from the plazas of Paris to the villages of backcountry Connecticut. It is a perspective that shines through her work, a collection of folk art paintings on view in a new exhibition at the Les Beaux Arts Gallery in Greenwich.

"Aux Quatre Coins du Monde" ("Around The World") features more than 30 landscapes that serve as a de facto travelogue of Strasberg's globetrotting excursions. Each painting is illustrative of the artist's joie de vivre -- in the purity of color, attention to detail and vibrancy of her subjects.

"I put my heart and soul into my paintings," said Strasberg, who is self-taught. "It's like when you are a young person and you see everything with a pure perspective."

Making her first big splash at an exhibition at Le Coup au Coeur gallery in Paris in 1983, Strasberg went on to exhibit her work in France, Japan, Israel, Spain and the United States. This year, she opened Anne Strasberg's La P'tite Galerie at 555 8th Ave. in New York City.

"Aux Quatre" marks the artist's fourth solo show at the Les Beaux Arts Gallery at Round Hill Community Church. For Strasberg, a career in art was hardly guaranteed. Although she wanted to pursue painting from a young age, her parents encouraged her to enroll in technical school. It was only after seeing the world with her husband, American theater director John Strasberg, that she committed herself to painting.

Strasberg may have been born and raised in Paris, but her sense of child-like wonder has flourished in foreign lands. The United States has proven fertile ground for her creativity.

"I have paintings of the Amish country, of New York's Rockefeller Center, of the countryside in Connecticut, of the desert in Santa Fe," she said. "I love the country because it's beautiful, and the landscapes are so big. It really captures my imagination."